Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Can we rely on Google for critical missions?

In the last post, I mentioned that my Google site [I Love Taiwan] Google Group stopped working for about a month now. Repeated requests to Google Inc for help produced no useful response. A friend asked:

Do you have any idea what they think you did, or why they think they are justified in cutting off service?

Nope. I am confident the site became inaccessible not because of the content of the site, or anything I have done.

For the near term, I think you need to come up with a good, clear, concise explanation of what happened leading up to the suspension of service, and why Google might have suspended your account. Then explain why Google was wrong to do what they did. Finally, you should lay into Google for being unresponsive and stonewalling, in apparent violation of their prime directive not be be evil.

Nothing I can think of can justify disability of my Google site; it just happened out of the blue. Google is not suspending my account. In fact, all of my Google apps continue to work perfectly except my existing Google sites. A far-fetched speculation is that China made Google Inc disable my site because one of its subsite is Taiwan is not a part of China. If this is true, then Google Inc is helping China silence people and the whole world should be prepared to fight not just China, but also Google Inc.

Consider an even more serious disruption of Google service, and even more serious loss of years of historical data for Taiwan. The following is copied from http://taiwanyes.com/tvfilm_201007.php; The most shocking is that an youTube (a Google company) account twyes2 has been eliminated. As a result, so went all the videos Taiwan Yes 2 had uploaded to youTube over the years. These include many years of the recordings of the daily talk shows 大話新聞 and 新台灣論壇 that constitutes a faithful recording of the history of Taiwanese' struggle for democracy.

Are the two things related? If they are, it is too frightening for humanities. It means China and other evil forces can make Google Inc silence dissenters, prevent truth be told, and hide things they wish censored.